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A move by the Toronto police board to make officers more accountable for who they stop and card has led to a sharp decrease in street checks.

After officers were told by police Chief Bill Blair in July that they had to issue receipts for the carding interaction, at the direction of the board, they basically stopped carding altogether.

Carding went down more than 75 per cent after July, says a source who asked not to be named, and in October Blair told the board he was cancelling the receipts. The chief wouldn’t confirm the exact decrease, but said recently that it was “substantial.”

A series of Star investigations have shown the interactions disproportionately affect people with black and brown skin.

When asked recently by a reporter for an example of how, Deputy Chief Peter Sloly said contact cards play a role in virtually all gun and gang arrests and provided a link in solving the 1994 Just Desserts murder of Georgina “Vivi” Leimonis. More recently, a physical feature recorded on a “208” contact card during a traffic stop led police to accused murderer Dellen Millard.

Sloly said not every contact card “produces that level of public safety outcome, but every one of them has that potential.”

A police union official says officers stopped carding because they felt the receipts, which have information on the back about the complaint process, were an open invitation for people to protest.

And that was a Catch-22 because until recently, officers were measured each month on how much he or she carded, said Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack.

“I don’t think that’s what our members need to be doing — soliciting complaints,” said McCormack, although he acknowledged there is no evidence to suggest that is what happened.

“My opinion is those cards are an investigative tool. They should not be used for tracking police officers.”

In a report by police, officials say the receipts were cancelled because officers were spending a “significant amount of time explaining” their purpose and because only 20 per cent of people were taking them.

The police report also notes that officers were wasting time filling out a separate receipt, which duplicates some of the information on the card.

Rights activists have told the board they would like officers to give out a carbon copy of the full contact card, but the force has always rejected that. The report suggests police will now give out a business card receipt with a reference number.

The service is also moving to eliminate the physical contact card. Officers will record the information in their notebooks before entering the information in the database.

That information has changed little in the past few years, but the name of the form has: once called a “208,” the interaction has morphed into a “street check” and more recently, to a “306” or Community Inquiry Report. Police are now rebranding the information taken during the stop as a “community safety note.”

In large cities such as New York and Philadelphia, police are required to record the information on a separate form. In London, officers fill out a form or make an electronic entry, for which they then give out a receipt.

Toronto police stop hundreds of thousands of people each year, recording on contact cards details such as an individual’s name, address, description, and the personal information of the people they’re with. The information is then entered into a police database that by now contains millions of names.

The vast majority of cards are filled out during non-criminal encounters. Between 2008 and 2012, one in 10 people carded was arrested and charged by Toronto police during that same time period.

A recent Star investigation showed the proportion of cards for black people in Toronto is three times greater than blacks’ share of Toronto’s population.

The police board has acknowledged the value of carding in investigations, with a few major caveats: “Gathering and retention of contact information under clearly defined circumstances, based on bona fide reasons and proper supervision can be a legitimate tool for effective police work,” wrote police board chair Alok Mukherjee in a report that will be presented at a public meeting on Monday at city hall.

Mukherjee says racial profiling is inexcusable, whether the impact is intentional or not.

The service is working to correct the impact of carding by implementing 31 recommendations contained in its internal report, called the Police and Community Engagement Review.

The recommendations include doubling the time officers spend in community response units, diversity training and early intervention for officers who show bias, more legal training, and public reports showing a breakdown of contact cards by race and demographics.

The force says it will bring in an external organization to regularly evaluate the implementation of the recommendations, which are being phased in over the next three years. At the end of 2016, they’ve asked the city’s auditor general to do a compliance audit.

The Law Union of Ontario says the PACER report is not going to bring carding in line with the Charter or the Human Rights Code because the practice is “neither legitimate nor justifiable.”

“The fact that such intrusions disproportionately involve male, black, youth as evidenced by reports from Communities and the Toronto Star findings are a clear violation of these safeguards,” the law union wrote in response to PACER. “Street Checks are discriminatory and often race based and as such violate the Ontario Human Rights Act.”

Mukherjee is skeptical that the police service, with its 7,000-plus individuals, can make such a massive organizational change from within.

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